Making up Creatures (Special Edition) Transcript

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Welcome to Imaginary Worlds, special holiday edition. I’m Eric Molinsky.

I interview a lot of people for this podcast, and sometimes a lot of that tape ends up on the proverbial cutting room floor. So, every year, I like to play a full-length interview of a previous guest who had so much more to say than I could it into their particular topic.

Last summer, I did an episode called Making Up Creatures where I talked with the creature designer Neill Gorton, who is best known for working on the reboot of Doctor Who under the first two show runners, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat. He also worked on the Doctor Who spin-off shows Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Neill specializes in practical effects, meaning special effects that don’t use CGI. I grew up watching movies and shows with practical effects, so I find this topic endlessly fascinating. And Doctor Who is famous for being jam packed with aliens that need to be created on a very limited budget.

And this is a perfect time to play a long interview with Neill because -- even though he doesn’t work on Doctor Who anymore -- the show is coming back for their annual holiday special, featuring the classic villain, the Daleks.

By the way, Neill was recording himself at home. And around 10 minutes into our interview, he discovered his recorder was not on. I was recording a back-up over Zoom, so that’s what you’ll hear in the beginning. And then his high-quality audio will kick in after the break.

I started out by asking Neill if there was anything he saw as a kid that inspired him to go into the field of creature effects.

NEILL: Well, I remember a big influence on me actually was I grew up in Liverpool, just up the coast from Liverpool is Blackpool, which is a popular whole holiday resort. And they had a, a Doctor Who exhibition there, and there was something about seeing those, all those pops and the costumes and the masks in person. You suddenly realize someone made them. And I think that kind of really stuck with me. Do you remember what creatures specifically, you saw the Doctor Who exhibit that you're like, oh my God, I have seen that on TV? NEILL: There was definitely a Davros in there. That was the one that really caught my eye because I remember as a kid seeing Davros for the first time and being really creeped out by him on, on the show and not understanding that it was a makeup. I 2 mean, I must've only been about five or six and just thinking, where did they find this strange little withered math? Hah!

DOCTOR: Davros, for the last time consider what you’re doing. Stop the development of the Daleks DAVROS: Impossible. It is beyond my control. The workshops are already fully automated to produce the Dalek machines.

NEILL: And then, yeah, they, you know, they had the chair and the figure and the mask was obviously on a mannequin and there, it was in the exhibit. Well, how did you get involved with Doctor Who? I mean, you must've been ecstatic when you, uh, first got, did you first just get a call out of nowhere? NEILL: It was almost, it was, um, I'd heard the show was happening. And then I heard that a friend of mine, a makeup artist called Davy Jones. Cause he'd worked with Russell T. Davis before. And so I just kind of went, Oh, well, there you go. It's gone. Davy's got the gig. And what had happened is Davey had said, it looked at the first script. He did initially been told that it was, you know, it wasn't a big creature sort of prosthetics job. So he kind of, Davey kind of works as a one man band. So he kind of said, okay, I'm sure we can handle it. And then when he saw, I had seen the scripts and there was eight foot, Slitheen and all the rest, he immediately just went. Now this is too big for me to take on, on my own. One of the things I think is so fascinating about the new series is the way the aliens from the classic series were redesigned. I did a whole episode about the Daleks, so I know that there was a lot of pressure to keep it Daleks similar, but, but with other aliens like the Cybermen, or what is the name of the big egghead aliens that are like, cloned soldiers? NEILL: Sontarans? Sontarans, right.

DOCTOR: And your name? STYRE: General Styre of the 10th Sontaran fleet! Styre the undefeated! DOCTOR: Aw, that’s a very good nick name. What if you do get defeated? Styre the undefeated but not anymore never mind?

So tell me, what was that was like in terms of, you know, you grew up with these classic creatures and, and to have the opportunity and even the challenge of making them seem believable with modern technology and, and even much better TV sets to which people could really see your work? 3

NEILL: It comes with a whole host of issues. So there's people who are just like, you can't touch anything. It doesn't matter what you do. They will freak out. I mean ultimately if, if, if I made a Sontaran and looked like a Sontaran and looked in the seventies, it'd be laughed off the screen nowadays because they really weren't just like a giant rubber head that did not move with a big cutout where the guy poked his lip out and his tongue out and they were completely immobile. And of course, like the costume, you know, that was very, that quilted sort of finished was it was done because it was a very cheap solution, you know, fast forward and you get to do that. And of course, you're going to make it more expressive. You're going to bring it up to date. You've got to make these changes. You're going to, and of course you're going to upset somebody. So you just have to take it on the chin. I mean, it is funny. I mean, it was like people kind of get frustrated and they like all the Cybermen have changed and it's like, go back. I mean, they, they looked, there was kind of five different versions of the Cybermen from the sixties, seventies and the eighties. Yeah. It was changing all the time anyway, Can you, can you pick maybe one example of, of like one of those alien types characters that there was a lot of back and forth between you and either Davies or Moffitt about like, how are we going to do this? And you sort of like, like there were just a lot of questions you needed to, to answer. NEILL: The Cybermen with Russell where it was a huge thing because it, you know, they're such a, they kind of second, only to the Daleks. So we did the Daleks in the first series anyway. So, so really bring back the sideman and it was, it was a huge, you know, two-parter and then they're in the finale and all that kind of thing. So it was, uh, uh, budgetary wise with massive undertaking and just the whole redesign. And by that time, of course it was the second series of the new series. So the first series you could have done whatever. There was no one to complain, no one had even seen the new series, no one even thought it was going to be a success. So come the second, there was a massive amount of interest, lots of media interest, lots more pressure. And it did, it went back and forth for a long time. Just really trying to figure out what the best approach was. How would we make them look?

CYBERMAN: You will be deleted DOCTOR: But we surrender! We surrender! CYBERMAN: Man is inferior. You will be reborn as Cybermen. You will perish. Prepare for maximum deletion.

NEILL: The were massive, um, fan reaction, especially amongst younger generations. The voice change helmet of the Cybermen was the number one toy at Christmas that year that's kind of a real badge of honor in UK is to have the number one Christmas toy. And that was it. You know? So, so I'd like to think, you know, that that alone kind of justifies that we got it. Right? 4

So is the idea that it's easier to relate to humanoid aliens? Like the more humanist they look, there's more room for the actor to perform. There's more room for the audience to sort of identify with them. NEILL: That's the principle you get. I get into this discussion a lot because you go into meetings where basically you get directors, who've not shot with people in rubber costumes basically going right. If I haven't got eyes, I haven't got a mountain. I haven't got, you know, the, the, those humanoid features, those standards are, how can I tell a story? So that's a constant kind of battle. Sometimes is the, the, there is often a push to make them as human order as possible, but I'm always kind of pulling the other way. I'm very much because you know, it, you look at different shows. Doctor Who very much, never worry too much about that. Historically, you know, you had had those more humanoid characters, but you also had, you know, quite extreme things, which didn't even have a mouth that moved or anything, and yet you could still get lots of character and you completely bought into it. So I was always kind of trying to go look, you know, I know it's easy to go over that way and you feel that that's, you're going to be more comfortable with that, but statically that's just more, you know, the Star Trek universe. And we want to bring this more into, you know, the Doctor Who universe where you can have something really bizarre. You've just got to have faith in it and have faith in the script writing and the story and, and all that. Well, I mean, how often does the aliens described so much? I mean, are there sometimes that it, you know, it just says there, I mean, there must be a lot of aliens that you get to design just, just completely from scratch. NEILL: Absolutely. I mean, but at the same time, you know, it's, it's fun working with an initial idea. If someone just says to me, design an alien, you almost freeze, you know, you kind of go look at the so many different things I could do. I don't even know where to start. Whereas if someone just gives you, feed you a line and you can really bounce off that. So the, the Face of Boe, for example, you know, the script just said a giant face in a, in a tank of gas and that was almost written out. I mean, basically they were doing budgets and, and Russell was going, or it could be anything it's not important, you know, just a throw away. It's just a name I came up with, but I just went, no, I, I want to build that. I just think there's a fun thing there. Uh, so I did a very quick little sketch, and everyone agreed and that pretty much was, was entirely our design.

FACE OF BOE: We shall meet again Doctor for the third time, for the last time, and the truth shall be told. Until that day…(SFX)

After the break, we’ll hear more from my interview with Neill Gorton.

BREAK

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Let’s get back to my interview with Neill Gorton.

One of my favorite shows that he worked on was called Being Human. It was about a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf who were flat mates together in the city of Bristol. Neill got a lot of praise for the werewolf transformation in that show, which is impressive because we’ve seen so many werewolf transformations over the years, it’s hard to do one that stands out. And he didn’t do anything out-of-the ordinary, he just made sure the effects felt very grounded and real.

NEILL: The BBC was doing this, had an idea which was to commission a bunch of pilots, uh, in a way that hadn't been done before. It was kind of, uh, you know, I think you do it in the U S a lot more where they, they commissioned these pilot shows and then commissioned the series. I remember reading the script and just being blown away by the script was such a great story, great characters. And the budgets were tiny, but in reading it, you know, it was so down to earth, it was so real. Uh, and the fact that we were filming and Bristol and the counter locations, it, it was all, it wasn't going to be a fantastical show. It was going to be very, very down to Earth. So when I had a first meeting with them, when we were talking about werewolves and transformations and all this, I instantly, I was just like, you can't possibly do CGI because you will immerse an audience in such a real world, familiar world, the minute you do anything digital, it's going to jar badly. It's going to feel so wrong, got to do this all physically. And basically, there was, there was no budget for a finished werewolf, but the same werewolf transformations we built for the pilot, which I built for, for no money. I made absolutely nothing out of, you know, uh, they, um, we just kept re-skinning and reusing them for everybody all the time. Yeah. I mean, the transformation that really got to me was George’s girlfriend Nina because I really liked her character and I felt terrible that she got infected by George, and she didn’t even want to tell him because George already had a lot of guilt and shame around being a werewolf.

ANNIE: What do we do? NINA: We just wait. (SFX) Argh! It’s coming!

And that was the first time I had seen a female werewolf transformation. Was your thinking around that? NEILL: No, I mean, we we'd worked out, you know, the principal was there, you know, I mean, Rick Baker did it on American Werewolf years ago, you know, the principal was there with the stretching things and then it was just trying to make them look a bit different each time and, and with each different character, uh, and you, and it was that, you know, keeping the sympathy, the main thing was we were trying to avoid completely 6 grotesque, you know, because you're the, you like these people, they, you know, it's a great show. These are some of our favorite characters, you know, you don't want them to be so kind of horrific in a way visually, uh, not be, I don't know how to put it, but, you know, put off buying them in a way. So yeah, all the time you're trying to design those transformations to, to elicit those emotions, you know, are engaged with it. Feel sympathy, feel more of the pain than them being horrified by it. That's so interesting. I think that is it. I think that's what made those transformations so powerful was that you really felt the physical and emotional pain that Nina and George were going through in a way that I think I, that, that I think I hadn't seen before, I think very often there, that's often a like, look how gross this, you know, kind of, NEILL: That’s it or look how cool we can make this. Yeah. NEILL: And again, which is where the CGI thing you'll notice that there is a very little use of CGI. There was like a vampire decaying that they did what I think in one episode. And it just totally takes you out of the episode. It's just like, this just feels so wrong in this kind of show, which just feels utterly real. So yeah, you know, it w all the time it was the, I think it was that that really made it work was the fact that they were real, tactile, physical things in the real environment. Uh, and you have those changes and the stretching and all of that going on, and it's very real and physical. So you connect with it. Whereas, you know, we had, we stuck all the prosthetics on them and big teeth and bladders under the skins and stretch bits of them and then cut between the animatronics as well. So you never quite knew if it was the person or the mechanical thing. And we blended the main to the transformation so that you do you stay connected then because you feel it's real, it's an entry. You know, I, I think CGI digital and all that is fantastic tools and brilliant stuff, you know, but it's like anything you've got to apply it correctly. It's interesting about Doctor, Who, you know, I had a conversation with the guys who do all the merchandising and I basically said, look, what, what sells better toys have characters who were physical or toys of characters that were CGI? And they went, Oh, absolutely. The physical ones. They said, the CGI ones are always left on the shelf. You know, they, they don't seem to connect with the audience as much. And that, and to me, I, you know, I, I know that, you know, if a kid is looking at a Cybermen on screen, he can tell the difference between a real one and a digital one. He'll like the real one more, because there's a good chance. He could also meet that character. You physically can meet that in the real world. So that makes it much more something they embrace more. Yeah. That is a fascinating point about the toys. Um, I can totally see that. So without, you know, without mentioning any specific films or makeup artists, are there elements of other people's work that kind of make you cringe? Just generally speaking that you're like, Oh God, not that. And I'm, we're talking 7 practical effects of like certain cliches that people keep using over and over again. NEILL: There's, there's a, there's a lot of comedy ones that we all talk about in the industry. I mean, they, we always get this one. Okay. It's a, it's like a horror movie or something and you'll get the director go. Okay. So what happens now is the creature turns around and his mouth opens and it keeps opening and it kind of dislocates his Jorn, his jaw opens ridiculously wide and everyone just goes out, God, cause that's that same. Thing's been used so many times that is not at all original. And it's, it's like the first thing when someone created a CGI character, when I'm not limited, I can make that mouth go really big. And everybody has used that in every movie. It going back to, you know, the kind of the earlier sort of big CGI opuses the, the, the mummy and fan housing and everything. Everything can dislocate its jaw and open its mouth ridiculously wide. So we're forever trying to say to people, look, I'm sorry, that's just not, that's not that clever. Really. We need to come up with something clever in than that. What about like, uh, on a much smaller scale, like, you know, you teach, what are some common rookie mistakes that students often make when they start doing practical effects? NEILL: There's, there's a lot to very similar. I mean, the number one of the one I'm always talking to students about is bigger. Isn't better. Uh, so people will go, I won't go build this creature and I'm going to have these homes and they're going to be enormous. And you just go, you know, aren't the so many things that are just wrong with that, which is it's going to be difficult to build difficult, to make difficult. And also, you know, you, you want to put this in a portfolio. You want to put this in a book. If you will, the horns are four foot wide to get them in a shop means your head's going to be really small. So think about, you know, how it fits in a frame, you know, whether it's on a screen or in a, in a photograph, you know, you want this thing to be contained within an image. So the minute you make something really crazy big or over the top, it's just off the frame anyway. So it's not going to do you any good. So yeah, it's trying to bring people down, you know, from, from throwing everything in. I mean, we have these tour, I do this thing with the students where we talk through the principles of design and I'm always pointing out. It's like, it's a good design is something that you see and you get the story, you understand what it is without anyone telling you or needing lots more information. It's it reminds me of too, you know, I tried taking screenwriting classes for a while and you always talked about like, what's your elevator pitch? In one sentence, can you sum up your story. I was wondering is that the same thing with creatures, do they have to so simple that you can describe them in one sentence, like the Ood, who you designed. I can totally describe them in a single sentence. They’re bald alien humanoids, with tentacles instead of mouths. 8

NEILL: This is it. I mean, you do you just hang your hand in front of your face and you, you, you almost, even when I'm talking about it, I'd put my hand up and like, it's a bunch of tentacles, you know, you can't help that. And that’s what good design is. You know, that's why the darling is such a classic, you know, because you can mimic it, you stick your arms out and kind of, you know, shuffle around in a certain way. And kids can mimic being a Daleks. So Russell was very good at tuning into those, those really very simple ideas.

DALEK: Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!

NEILL: And Steve Moffat as well, I still think the Weeping Angels is absolute genius because to take something you can see anywhere and then just go, that’s an alien

SALLY: What do you mean, angels? You mean those statue things? DOCTOR [on screen]: Creatures from another world. SALLY: But they're just statues. DOCTOR [on screen]: Only when you see them. SALLY: What does that mean? DOCTOR [on screen]: The lonely assassins, they used to be called. No one quite knows where they came from, but they're as old as the universe, or very nearly, and they have survived this long because they have the most perfect defence system ever evolved. They are quantum-locked. They don't exist when they're being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature, they freeze into rock.

NEILL: It was pure genius and that’s what created a classic monster without it being a monster. And I, that's why I always loved about working with, with Steve and Russell was, was just those kinds of when they come up with something that you just think, Oh my God, how did that, how did I not think about myself? It's so simple, but clever, and just really pokes at our various emotions. Are there ever any other, any miscue, like, let's say you go home for Christmas and you meet some relative. Who's just like, you know, you're doing that special effects things still. Um, what are, are there any common misconceptions of people who don't really understand what you do for a living that you come across? NEILL: Yeah. There's, there's always, um, there's always those kinds of things. People think, you know, it's, it's like you just turn up on the day and you like model it on someone's face. It's like you take out a big bag of kind of clay rubber and model something on someone's face. And it's like, no, we've spent weeks before doing all these molds and casts and sculptures, and, and then you go and apply these prosthetics. Um, and it's just the usual misconceptions people get about any kind of 9 filming. You know, they, I mean, everyone always thinks the Daleks are all completely remote controlled, you know, and they don't realize it's actually, you know, a guy inside kind of pushing it along, you know, even Davros, uh, people are always stunned to find out that Julian had to actually move himself along. And he, he literally had to practice or ages to, to, to be able to move the chair without it looked like he looking like he was peddling, you know, because he's actually, his legs are motivating it. Uh, everyone always thinks it's far more technologically advanced than it is. Huh, that’s interesting. NEILL: I'm always fascinated by how working in the industry when you step out of it and see what fans are interested in. It's like going to a convention. I mean, my favorite thing was going to a Doctor Who convention, my first proper Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles and defining the whole experience, very confusing just because it's not what I expected. And, and I don't think it was meant to be this, but there was a real kind of indifference to the work I did. There was an absolute fascination with an actor, absolute fascination with writers, almost as much with directors, but not as much, but anyone else, if you were behind the scenes, people, you seem to be irrelevant. And I don't mean to say that in a terrible way, you know, but it was just interesting watching. I mean, there was even a queue of people going by and basically, you know, you're sat there with your pan and at 1.2 kind of kids, like 14-year-old boys were kind of in front of us, in their cube, waiting for someone else. Um, one kid notches, the other, and says, uh, so what about these guys? You know, kind of pointed us. I was sat there with the pens and the other kid, and this is right in front of us. And the other kid tends to back to his mate and says, no, dad, I only get the important people. It was just, I was so funny though, you know, just the way he did it, it was just brilliant. Yeah. I wonder if people just take it for granted to some extent that you, the work you do because they don't maybe understand what goes into it. NEILL: I think, I think there's kind of, I don't think it's time to, I think if you look back because something like Star Wars, it was an absolute revolution in production design, the robot to the alien, all the creatures, it was fabulous design. It had, uh, you know, it was, it was streets ahead of things like Doctor Who at the time for Doctor Who, you know, the aliens were secondary. The creatures were secondary to tell those stories. Um, you know, in the ‘70s, they, they were, they were made of beanbags and plastic bubble wrap and you know, really, really crude. And that was part of the charm. But also it wasn't about that stock to who's always very much been about story. I feel Star Wars is always that universe, and Russell said, you know, about writing Doctor Who, he's like, it's the greatest story ever told, you know, it's the most simple and greatest he can go anywhere and do anything and travel in time. So, so it is, it's, it's an interest in perspective. And, uh, and I see that, you know, I see that very much with what it is, what does, what attracts fans to different shows.

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That’s it for this week, thank you for listening. Special thanks to Neill Gorton

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook, I tweet at emolinsky and imagine worlds pod. The show’s website is imaginary worlds podcast dot org. And the best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. And I want to thank everyone who donated on Patreon this year, and the show’s GoFundMe page. Your support helped to keep this podcast going. So thank you very much, and happy holidays!